How to spawn actors

You create an actor by spawning it with a behavior. A behavior is

1. a callable Julia object and (if it accepts arguments)
2. the actors acquaintance parameters.

You must either import spawn explicitly or call it as Actors.spawn:

julia> using Actors
julia> import Actors: spawn
julia> myactor = spawn(println, "Hello ")Link{Channel{Any}}(Channel{Any}(32), 1, :default)

We spawned the actor with a println behavior function and "Hello " as an acquaintance parameter on an available thread. The returned Link can be used to send a message (a communication parameter) to the actor:

julia> send(myactor, "World!");

Our actor then executed println("Hello ", "World!"). It continues to wait for messages.

with a user-defined behavior

We can write our own behavior function. Thereby we must consider, which arguments the actor should work with. As we have seen, an actor can have acquaintance parameters and it gets its communication parameters with an incoming communication. The behavior function must accept both those as arguments. In the following example we let that open and write a behavior function thrd_println which can be invoked with arbitrary args...:

julia> using .Threads
julia> function thrd_println(args...)
           println(args..., " from thread ", threadid())
       endthrd_println (generic function with 1 method)

In order to try that out, we want to start our actor on a given thread.

on a thread

We can start an actor on a specific thread by using the thrd keyword argument:

julia> nthreads()2
julia> myactor = spawn(thrd_println, "Hello ", "my ", thrd=2)Link{Channel{Any}}(Channel{Any}(32), 1, :default)

As before we can send the communication parameter to the actor and it will now call our user-defined behavior with it:

send(myactor, "world");

Hello my world from thread 2

Note that this works only if we have started Julia with the -t or --threads flag or the JULIA_NUM_THREADS environment variable set.

on a distributed worker

If we have distributed worker processes available either by starting Julia with the -p or --procs flag or by starting them explicitly with addprocs, we can create actors on those by using the pid keyword argument to spawn:

julia> using Distributed

julia> worker = addprocs(2);      # start worker processes

julia> @everywhere using Actors   # make Actors available everywhere

julia> myactor = spawn(println, "Hello ", pid=worker[2])
Link{RemoteChannel{Channel{Any}}}(RemoteChannel{Channel{Any}}(3, 1, 351), 3, :default)

Now spawn returned a Link with a RemoteChannel to the actor and we can send it communication parameters as usual:

julia> send(myactor, "World!");

       From worker 3:    Hello World!

Actors are location-transparent and actors residing on different threads, processes and machines can communicate with each other by using their links.